O’Connor’s work is important. Her life and spiritual witness is important as well.

For Flannery O’Connor, like all of us, had plans. Unlike many of us, perhaps, she also had a clear sense of her own gifts. As a very young woman, she set out to follow that path. She had fantastic opportunities at Iowa, made great connections and seemed to be on the road to success at a very young age. Wise Blood was accepted for publication when she was in her early 20s. She was in New York. She was starting to run in invigorating literary circles.

And then she got sick.

And she had to go back to her mother’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.

O’Connor’s story is a helpful and necessary corrective, it seems to me, of the current spiritual environment which privileges choice and health and seeks to baptize secular notions of success, achievement, and even beauty. What is missing from all of that is a cheerful acceptance of limitations and a faith that even within those limitations—only within those limitations—we are called to serve God.

Secondly, the association of the breaking through of the Holy Ghost with coldness. A chill. An enduring chill. There are a number of ways to look at it, since the “chill” is of course a reference to fever, but this morning I couldn’t stop thinking about Flannery’s continual argument against the modern expectation that “faith” is what brings us contentment and satisfaction. In the Gospel today, Jesus says Peace be with You. But that’s after the crucifixion, you know.

Also on Asbury’s mind- primary, really – was his mother. How he blamed her for his own failure as a would-be artist, and how what he wanted to do most of all was make her see this. To give her an enduring chill that would be the result of her awareness of what she had done to him.

He would hurt her, but that was just too bad. It was what was necessary, he determined, to get her to see things as they really are. Irony, of course, comes to rest on him in the end as the Holy Ghost descends.

So I read and talked about this story about parents, children, disappointment, blame, pride and being humbled.

Then I drove up to Knoxville, alone, thinking about Asbury, about that Holy Ghost, about peace be with you and doubt no longer.

I drove up to see my father’s house for the last time and sign the papers so someone new could live there now.

Tears?

Sadness that my father died six months ago, that my mother died eleven years ago, that my husband died three years ago. Sadness for my dad’s widow. But then tempered, as I stood there and surveyed the surrounding houses and realized that almost every person who lived in those houses when we first moved in, is also dead.

Remembering that forty years ago, my parents were exactly where I am now, watching the preceding generation begin to die off, absorbing their possessions, making sense of what they’d inherited – in every sense – and contemplating where to go from there.

There’s nothing unique about it. It’s called being human. Not existing for a very long time, being alive for a few minutes, and then being dead for another very long time.

And in that short time, we try. I’m not going to say “we try our best” because we don’t. It’s why we ask for mercy. Especially when we live our days under the delusion of self-sufficiency, placing our faith in ourselves and our poor, passing efforts, closed to grace…when we live like that…no, we’re not trying our best. We need it, that Divine Mercy. We need it, and as Asbury has to learn, we need it to give, not just to take. More

There is a priest in the story, the priest who brings the family (the Guizacs) to the farm, and then continues to visit Mrs. McIntyre. He is old and Irish, listens to Mrs. McIntyre’s complaints about her workers and the difficulties of her life with a nod and a raised eyebrow and then continues to talk to her about the teachings of the Church.

He is seen by the others as a doddering fool, talking about abstractions, not clued into the pressing issues of the moment, telling Mrs. McIntyre, for example, about what the Son of God has done, redeeming us, “as if he spoke of something that had happened yesterday in town….”

And at the end, as Mrs. McIntyre watches the black figure of the priest bend over a dead man ” slipping something into the crushed man’s mouth…” we see why he spoke of it that way.

It did happen yesterday in town. It happens today.

He’s here.

The priest, too, is the only character who recognizes transcendence. Every time he comes to the farm, he is transfixed by the peacocks (see the header on the blog today), a fascination the others think is just one more symptom of foolishness and “second childhood.”

You must be born again….

And here is the “irony.” Although steeped in Catholic faith and sensibilities, we know it is not ironic – but to the world’s eyes, it is. That the priest who expresses the mysteries in such matter-of-fact, “formulaic” ways, ways which even theologians today fret are not nuanced or postmodern enough, which they would like to dispense with in favor of…what, I am not sure, unless it is one more set of windy journal articles…this priest is, as I said, the only character who can recognize beauty and the transcendent reflected there. And the one who embodies Mercy.

Flannery O’Connor always said that she found the doctrines of the Church freeing – and this is what she means.

And the story ends:

Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.

Most of what O’Connor reviewed was non-fiction, and she did not like most of the fiction she did review – J.F. Powers, Paul Horgan and Julien Green being the unsurprising exceptions in the otherwise flowerly garden of pietistic fiction she endured.

The non-fiction choices are fascinating, although not a surprise to anyone familiar with the contents of O’Connor’s personal library and the scope of her reading we can discern from her letters. She was very concerned with the intellectual life of American Catholics and indeed saw what she was doing for the papers as in some way an act of charity in which readers might be encouraged to read beyond the pieties.

She was especially interested in Scripture, dismayed that Catholics did not read more of it, and quite interested in the Old Testament, especially the prophets. Again, perhaps not a surprise? She was, as is well-known, quite interested in Teilhard de Chardin, and reviewed a few books by Karl Barth, as well.

Robert Coles answered the question well when he wrote of O’Connor, “She is stalking pride.” For Flannery O’Connor, faith means essentially seeing the world as it is, which means through the Creator’s eyes. So lack of faith is a kind of blindness, and what brings on the refusal to embrace God’s vision — faith — is nothing but pride.

O’Connor’s characters are all afflicted by pride: Intellectual sons and daughters who live to set the world, primarily their ignorant parents, aright; social workers who neglect their own children, self-satisfied unthinking “good people” who rest easily in their own arrogance; the fiercely independent who will not submit their wills to God or anyone else if it kills them. And sometimes, it does.

The pride is so fierce, the blindness so dark, it takes an extreme event to shatter it, and here is the purpose of the violence. The violence that O’Connor’s characters experience, either as victims or as participants, shocks them into seeing that they are no better than the rest of the world, that they are poor, that they are in need of redemption, of the purifying purgatorial fire that is the breathtaking vision at the end of the story, “Revelation.”

The self-satisfied are attacked, those who fancy themselves as earthly saviors find themselves capable of great evil, intellectuals discover their ideas to be useless human constructs, and those bent on “freedom” find themselves left open to be controlled by evil.

What happens in her stories is often extreme, but O’Connor knew that the modern world’s blindness was so deeply engrained and habitual, extreme measures were required to startle us: “I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.” More

In April 1948, Wallace Stevens received a letter from a nun. Her name was Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, and she was completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin. It was their first correspondence, and she’d enclosed some notes on his poetry, for which he was thankful: “It is a relief to have a letter from someone that is interested in understanding.” His short response to her includes a curious personal admission: “I do seek a centre and expect to go on seeking it.”

In 1951, after a literary critic detected a sense of spiritual “nothingness” in his poetry, Stevens wrote Sister Bernetta with a clarification: “I am not an atheist although I do not believe to-day in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy.” Considering the debate over Stevens’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism, his heartfelt letters to Sister Bernetta are tantalizing. What made the poet comfortable sending such honest thoughts from Hartford, Connecticut to Winona, Minnesota?

NOTE: If you really want a copy soon – I have them for sale at my online bookstore (price includes shipping) Email me at amywelborn60 AT gmail if you have a question or want to work out a deal of some sort. I have many copies of this, the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories, the Prove It Bible and the Catholic Woman’s Book of Days on hand at the moment.

(UPDATE, 6/7 11:00 PM – We are leaving for Japan in less than two weeks and I just received notice that because of a new Japanese law related to homesharing, my AirBnB reservation is…sketchy. More later, but let’s just say that AirBnB is handling this well, and….it will all be okay. It will all be okay….)

Blog version:

My 13-year old and I spent Thursday night and Friday morning at Auburn University. We didn’t need to be there Thursday night, but if we hadn’t gone down then – we would have had to rise at 5 or so in order to arrive on time for his event. So I used some points and we just stayed in the area.

The reason? The Alabama State Music Teacher’s annual convention and workshops. In the world of student musicians, as with everything else these days, competition is a part of life, and my son did well enough in the state level of competition to be invited to play in a master class with pianist and music educator Fred Karpoff.

(Now, the big win would have been coming out on top of the scores and qualifying to play in a recital at the convention. He was a little disappointed that he didn’t qualify for that, but it might have been for the best, considering the rest of the weekend’s obligations. Or not. Because knowing the mess the rest of the weekend was – we’d have been better off just playing and listening to music all weekend. Or would we have? You just never know, because you learn something valuable everywhere. That’s not just a platitude. Okay, it might be a platitude, but it’s not just a platitude. Because it’s true.)

It was a good experience, and we’re grateful to M’s teacher for helping him hone his playing to this point.

Now that I think about it, I understand why I didn’t just sit myself down and churn out a post about this on Sunday night or Monday morning. I am still not quite sure what to say about it. Well, I know what I want to say about it, but I am not sure if I should or not.

What was it? The National History Bee. M had competed last year with his school and qualified for nationals, and we went. This year, he competed as a homeschooler, qualified for nationals at the regional competition, and so..we went. I held off registering until about two weeks before the competition because I didn’t know how the piano thing was going to work out – that is, if he “won” there and had a chance to perform at the recital, yeah, buddy – you’re doing that.

And honestly, having been through the national competition last year, I was indifferent to whether he went this year. Competing in the regionals was fine – it was here in Birmingham in February, I think, and preparing for it gave shape to his homeschool history work. As in I could say, “Go study for the history bee” and call it a day.

But he wanted to do it, and when the way cleared, he asked if we could go ahead and register. Sure.

I really don’t want to rehash the whole weekend, and it was no more than 24 hours out of my life, and we did get to see my daughter who’d doing an internship in Atlanta this summer, so that’s all fine and good.

But – wow.

What a mess this was.

I mean – a total, absolute train wreck. Even my daughter, who has done her share of debate tournaments, athletic events, theater events, sorority events and everything else a very active young person might do said, “I’ve been to some disorganized events – but nothing like this.”

Whatever the outfit is that puts this on is nowhere near as established as those that sponsor the National Spelling Bee or the National Geographic (duh) Bee. I am not even sure who they are or what they’re about, really.

The structure was: Qualifying rounds plus a scantron exam on Friday, the total score of which would determine the top 256 who would then start off Saturday morning, and then to the Quarterfinals and so on.

My son did the written exam first and by the time he got to his first buzzer round, they were already running 45 minutes behind. The rounds were scattered in rooms around the hotel, with no notice on doors as to which round was happening. The qualifying results were supposed to be posted between 7-8 on Friday night. They didn’t go up (online) until 10:30. Then a new, adjusted version went up at 6:30 am Saturday, with some significant changes. My son had qualified to move on, but by the Saturday morning count – which no one knew was coming – he’d dropped about twenty places. Still qualified, but not everyone had that same experience. Some kids went to bed Friday night thinking they’d qualified, then woke up Saturday finding that they’d been dropped beyond the cutoff. Other kids had the opposite experience – they went to bed thinking they’d not qualified, revised rankings bumped them up – but they had no idea.

The Saturday morning qualifying round that my son was a part of was….one hour late in starting. Because they couldn’t locate the correct list of what kids were supposed to be in that room. Finally, a frazzled judge came in and said, “Screw it! We’ll just do it anyway – tell me your names.”

So yeah. It was pretty bad. I feel terrible for people who came from a distance and spent money to get there for this fairly miserable experience. My main inconvenience was that I hadn’t made hotel reservations for Friday not – reasoning that if my son didn’t qualify for the Saturday rounds, we could just go home.

There was no running tally during the competition, but having sat in on all the buzzer rounds, I felt pretty confident he’d qualified – especially considering that in most of the rounds, about a third of the kids got zero points, consistently, and M always got at least one – 256 was about the top 2/3 of competitors, I figured we were safe.

But I wasn’t sure, so I thought – well, if we find out between 7-8, that’s fine. With the time zone change, even if we leave Atlanta at 8, that’s like leaving at 7 our time, and we’re home by 9. No problem.

So we sat in the hotel lobby and waited for those rankings. And waited. And waited. Until finally, about 9pm, I gave up, said – we’re staying no matter what happens – and got a room.

But really – if I’d been one of those other families, coming from New York or Minnesota or California – and endured this? I would have no mind left, having given event staff so many pieces of it at that point.

This stuff is not my cup of tea anyway, of course. Competition can be helpful in pushing us forward in anything. I’m not saying it’s not. But there’s a definite academic competition subculture, immersion in which does little to encourage authentic learning or wisdom. My son does enjoy the competition, though – not enough to give much of his day over to studying, that’s true, and certainly not to Master Lord of History Trivia Level – but if it spurs him on to do a bit of extra reading, that’s fine.

But take this as a warning. If you ever hear about this competition and contemplate having your school participate – think twice. Really. Maybe even think three times. This was jaw-droppingly inept. I can’t and won’t ascribe any motivations to anyone. All I know was what we and hundreds of others experienced – and it was unprofessional and honestly, an injustice to participants.

We arrived back home early Saturday afternoon, having processed The Defeat (he missed getting to the quarterfinals by one question, but honestly – we were glad to be out of there), rested a bit, and then with brother (who’d stayed home by himself because he’s a Working Man) headed downtown to watch the filming of scenes from a movie called Live. It stars Aaron Eckhart, whom my sons know as Harvey Dent from some Batman movie but I know from Neil Labute movies. I enjoy watching movies being filmed – for short periods of time, since there is a lot of waiting…- it’s just interesting to see all the moving parts.

“When a man only got his letters in the morning he was pretty safe from surprises for the rest of the day; but with the telegraph he has no remission from anxiety and is on the tenter-hooks all day long.” —Philadelphia Medical Times, 1883

Remember last week when I told you about our lovely Nature Moments with Baby Birds? So sweet! So picturesque! So…nature-y!

Oh, well:

It happened at some point Sunday night or very early Monday morning. We saw them Sunday night, and then when I went out the next morning – all I saw was the nest on the ground and a scattering of feathers – and a couple legs (which were gone by the time I took this photo the next day). I’m assuming it was hawks. So yes – very nature-y. Serious, blunt force nature.

Here’s the odd thing, though.

The parents stuck around. It was pretty sad when I discovered the carnage on Monday morning – both parents were flying around, landing on the branches and cables nearby, squawking and chirping loudly – warning me, calling the babies, wondering where the heck did they go?

The next day – they were still there.

Also the next day, our yard guys came and for some reason, they set the nest (which I’d left on the patio, intending to take in later) back up on the drain pipe.

Wednesday when I went out to catch some rays – the parents were still there. And what were they doing? Flying back and forth with grass and twigs to the nest.

For those of you who don’t know, Rectify is a television series seen on Sundance TV that’s “about” a man released from prison after 19 years on death row for a murder he may or may not have committed.

The point is not really that particular mystery. The point is the impact the incarceration and the re-entry has had on this character, Daniel, and his family. Rectify is about human connection and how we do or don’t live with ambiguity and change. The acting is magnificent, the pace is meditative.

I like Rectify for a lot of reasons. I appreciate the southern setting. It’s filmed in Georgia, in a town a bit southwest of Atlanta, and a couple of the actors have Birmingham connections. I once saw and chatted with actor Michael O’Neil, who plays the corrupt senator in the series, in the Whole Foods here in town. The accents are good – even though two of the leads are Australian!

It’s a profoundly spiritual piece, with more than a hint of Flannery O’Connor.

So let’s get back to this first episode of this fourth and last season of Rectify.

When the third season ended, Daniel Holden was leaving his hometown of Paulie, Georgia for Nashville. He had been convicted of raping and murdering his high school girlfriend, but released from Death Row on an evidential technicality. He had confessed to the crime at the time, but we have seen in flashbacks over the course of the series that this confession was almost coerced and that there are certainly others who might have committed the crime. But what we see of and hear from Daniel in the present has never been enough to lead us to conclude on his guilt in one direction or another. In fact, our general impression has been that he is not sure himself.

In any case, for various reasons, after a few months out of prison, Daniel has admitted to the murder and, as part of the plea, has been exiled from his hometown and the state and is taking up residence at a halfway house in Nashville, which is where we meet him at the beginning of the fourth season, which seems to be taking place a few months after the end of the last.

This first episode focuses solely on Daniel up in Nashville. We don’t see anyone from Paulie, and we have no idea what’s going on down there. The question is – how is Daniel adapting? The answer: he is walking and talking, but as if he is still in his death row cell that has shrunk, encased him and which he wears like a cloak.

At least in Paulie, he had his family, and as fraught and awkward as his relationships with them were, at least he had some degree of familiarity. Here in the halfway house and at his warehouse job, he functions, but he doesn’t interact. He just doesn’t know how, and in Aden Young’s performance – in his eyes, body language and strangled voice – we perceive that struggle and honestly, it makes us a little afraid.

Near the end of the episode, Daniel returns to the halfway house, and is pulled into conversation with one of the counselors. One of the core events of the episodes has been that Daniel’s roommate tested positive for drug use and left the house in the middle of the night. This initially seems like a tangential event that has nothing to do with Daniel.

But doesn’t it?

Daniel was his roommate. Daniel even saw him leave and did nothing, said nothing. There have been no fireworks or drama about this, but as the episode builds, the central question emerges:

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Well, yes, you are. “New Canaan” is the name of the halfway house and here, in this community of hope and new beginnings, yes, you are your brother’s keeper.

But this is not something Daniel knows a bit about, not because he wants to be cruel, but because almost two decades of isolation have malformed his soul.

This comes out in a cathartic conversation with the counselor, in dialogue that might seem a bit overwritten from Daniel’s perspective at first, but does make sense when you consider it as the fruit of twenty years of introspection and reading. It is not surprising that he would talk this way about his own existence and the stripping of his soul.

But even this is not what I want to focus on. For the core of Daniel’s dilemma comes down to this:

He doesn’t know. He honestly doesn’t know anymore if he killed Hannah or not. That uncertainty, that unknowing about the past, makes living in the present impossible.

Here’s what this made me think about last night, then:

Do any of us know the impact of our actions/ Do we have any clue to the reality of our own sins? Is there even any way for us to grasp every sin of omission and commission, what we have done and what we have failed to do? How the words I spoke in the grocery store yesterday helped or hurt and what they led to in someone else’s life a minute or an hour or ultimately a week down the road?

How tangled and mysterious is human history, activity and experience.

This is not to diminish the impact of sin. It is not to say there is no space for justice or requirement for restitution or judgment.

It is simply a recognition that there is only so much we can do for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and we can’t even begin to count the ways. God must do the rest. All of our efforts to make sense of our impact on others fall short not only because they are weak and limited but also because we don’t know what to do. We do not know how to pray as we ought, Paul says, and not just because human words are limited, but because we can’t comprehend the scope of our lives and our impact, for good and for ill, on others. We don’t know what we should be asking forgiveness for, not all of it, not really.

How can we rectify when our sins are either so great or so unknown to us?

So how do we live? In continued isolation, separating ourselves from others because we are afraid, we feel unworthy of them in our guilt, real or imagined, or we feel superior to them in our innocence, real or imagined?

Or do we do what we can, hand the rest over, and edge from the door to the side chair to the place waiting for us at the table with the other sinners in the house that is half way?

I stupidly rented a house down on the Gulf – as one does in this part of the world – then spent a couple of days in the week leading up to the weekend emailing the owner, my nervousness mounting by the day as I watched the weather turn, and turn badly, since with rentals that close to the booking date, you’re generally stuck no matter what. I got the boys out of school early that Friday, started down 65, and then got the call from the owner. Don’t bother, he said, it’s coming. (I think the storm was Lee?) But he was also very generous about the whole situation and offered another weekend to me – which he absolutely did not have to do.

Oh, well, the point was that ever since then I’ve not bothered to even think about making big plans, especially in this part of the country where Labor Day means not so much “end of summer” as “beginning of hurricane season.”

At first, this year, I had another reason to stick around as well: the boys were scheduled to serve at the convent Sunday morning. But early last week, Sister called and said that someone wanted to switch, and would that be possible? Since the weekend to which we’d switch was a weekend we had to be in town anyway for a piano recital…sure!

So, what to do? Friday night was high school football, and someone wanted to go to the game – as it ended up, both of them went. I toyed around with spending the next couple of nights away…but where? North Georgia mountains maybe? We’d done that one November and it was lovely. But this time – Nah. Too far. Nothing available for a reasonable price. Too much trouble. Besides, with both of them in school, hanging out at home and getting to sleep late in your own bed is a welcome change from days of early rising. “Vacation” would just not be restful, and I had to accept that.

(The son who has just come off four years of homeschooling said the other day, “The days seem so long now! Why do they seem so much longer?” I said, “Considering you used to sleep until 9 or 9:30 and now you get up at 6:30…yes, your days literally are longer. That might explain it.”)

But we managed to get out and about anyway.

Saturday morning, we started out at Pepper Place Market near our house, a farmer and crafty market which happens every Saturday from late April through November. I didn’t buy anything, but they like to wander and taste things and see the dogs people bring along.

(Huh. Thought I had pictures. Nope. Reason for everything.)

I then suggested Ruffner Mountain, where we’d not been in a while. It used to be quarried and mined, so there’s that attraction, as well as the views of the city. There are no creeks or other water features and not that many rocks to climb, though, so it’s not the first place that comes to mind for an interesting hike, but it’s about fifteen minutes from the house, plus there was an estate sale just a few houses away from the preserve’s gate, so that was what we settled on.

(We didn’t get much at the sale – just a few toys for the soon-to-be visiting grandson/nephew – and I picked up yet another empty, unused photo album. I hate spending ten bucks on those things, and these days, since hardly anyone actually prints photos anymore, I usually find at least one at most estate sales, and never pay more than a dollar. Because you’re fascinated, I’ll also tell you that the day before, I’d picked up two very good, heavy, barely used frying pans for two dollars each at another sale as well as a never-used door-frame pullup bar for ten, so I could finally fulfill a promise I’d made months ago to the boys. About a pull-up bar, not frying pans.)

Then a good walk.

Which took us to about three. Back home for a bit, then Mass, then…what? A movie? No, it’s football season now…so it was shifting between the Florida, Alabama, and Indiana games.

(Speaking of football. My daughter just started graduate school at Alabama. She said, “People here really do say “Roll, Tide” instead of things like “Heck,yeah.” So of course I sent her this:)
Sunday, I declared the Day We Would Find Martha’s Falls. The younger one had been there with a friend last year, and had been bugging me to go back ever since. I kept forgetting, and every time I would remember, it would be about 1 in the afternoon, and it’s an almost two-hour drive. But Sunday, I remembered earlier, and sleeping until ten was accepted as late enough, so up 59 we went.

(I am not a fan of that stretch of road, the interstate that takes you from here up to Chattanooga. It always brings to mind those months and months I drove it so many times back in late 2011 and 2012, when my father was sick and then died and then I had to go up to Knoville and back to settle things again and again. I also drove it into Birmingham when we first moved here in 2008- I must have been in Knoxville before the final leg. Every time, I mentally note the convenience store where I got gas. So I-59 always makes me think of death and the weird places life takes you. But again, I think about that every day, so no really a big change there, just in intensity.)

We had been to Little River Canyon and DeSoto Falls a few times before, but never to this section. If you ever have a chance, you really should check it out. It’s a gorgeous part of Alabama, and a really interesting land feature. What you have is Lookout Mountain – a loooooong mountain that is really part of the foothills of the Appalachians, and on top of that mountain and down into it is the Little River and the canyon it has carved, which is truly beautiful and not that developed. There are just a few spots to access the river and this one – Martha’s Falls or the “Hippie Hole” takes more than just a stroll from the car to get to. You park, and then you have to hike about a half mile through the woods, and much of the path is strewn with large rocks. The last few hundred feet take you down a fairly steep bank.

But it’s gorgeous!

It was also pretty busy, and I’d hate to see how busy it would get if it were easier to access. So they can keep the way it is. That’s fine.

There was swimming and jumping. He also jumped from one higher level on the bank than this, but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera to get it.

It was a typical Alabama scene. I hate to shatter your stereotypes, but a “typical Alabama scene” means that there are all different types of people there, enjoying themselves and getting along. College students, high school church groups, white, black, lots of Hispanics, South Asians, a group of Chinese families sporting Georgia Tech gear and a couple of dozen bikers.

Besides whatever you’re doing to amuse yourself, the major entertainment is watching people jump off the highest point on the bank. Some don’t hesitate, but more than a few do. We watched, for probably fifteen minutes, as a teenage girl considered the drop. She got to the edge half a dozen times, urged on by her friends below, looked as though she might do it, then backed away every time. Did Chloe ever jump? We’ll never know, because it was time for us to go.

Of course, I was boring and declared it to be a metaphor of sorts. I asked mine what it takes to do something you’re scared to do. “Just do it,,” they said. “Just stop thinking about it and what’s going to happen and just go.”

The integration of people with mental disorders into Geel society has fascinated scholars for centuries. In 1862, Dr. Louiseau, a visiting French doctor, described it as “the extraordinary phenomenon presented at Geel of 400 insane persons moving freely about in the midst of a population which tolerates them without fear and without emotion.” Nearly 100 years after that, an American psychiatrist named Charles D. Aring wrote in the journal JAMA, “The remarkable aspect of the Gheel experience, for the uninitiated[,] is the attitude of the citizenry.”

Early psychiatrists who observed Geel noticed that the treatment prescribed for mental patients was, in fact, no treatment at all. “To them, treating the insane, meant to simply live with them, share their work, their distractions,” Jacques-Joseph Moreau wrote in 1845. He and others advocated for that communion. “In a colony, like in Geel, the crazy people … have not completely lost their dignity as reasonable human beings.” In the next half-century, many would uphold Geel’s model as the best standard of practice for mental disorders.

This story is a very useful antidote to the current popular notion that it’s only recently that Catholics have learned how to be merciful, that in the past, the Church was all about building walls and elevating doctrine above pastoral care and looking inward.

How interesting that somehow, in this doctrinally “strict” culture in which no one supposedly understood what it really meant to follow Christ because the Mass was in Latin said quietly by the priest with His! Back! To! The! People!...this happened.

In the mid-14th century, Geel erected a church in Dymphna’s honor; it was built on the spot where she was buried. Around this time, rumors spread about disturbed individuals who were cured upon visiting Geel. As these accounts circulated, people began bringing disturbed family members, hoping for their own miracle. And many embattled souls made it to Geel on their own.

A building contiguous to St. Dymphna Church was built to accommodate the troubled pilgrims. Soon enough, the capacity of this structure was exceeded. Church authorities appealed to the citizens of Geel, who responded in a way that would eventually designate Geel as “the charitable city”: They welcomed mentally ill strangers into their homes.

The Geel community showed remarkable compassion, particularly for an era when most any sort of psychological aberration was viewed as being due to demonic influence or possession. Ronald J. Comer’s Abnormal Psychology mentions the typical techniques of the time for dealing with the psychologically aberrant. Exorcisms, of course, were performed. “Holy water” or “bitter drinks” might be administered. If these remedies failed to produce results, the ensuing therapy could consist of flogging, scalding, stretching of limbs, or starvation. It was hoped that these extreme measures might expunge the iniquity.

In contrast to these measures was the Geel way, in which the mentally ill, who were called “boarders” instead of “patients,” became a valued part of the community. Many of the boarders helped with agricultural labor. They were allowed to go about the village, and some even became regulars at local taverns. Some boarders stayed in Geel for only a few months; others stayed for the rest of their lives.

The boarder population peaked in the year 1938, when the number reached 3,736. About 1,600 remained by the late 1970s. Geel now has some 500 boarders and a total population of about 35,000.

For hundreds and hundreds of years, Geel was heavily influenced by purported miracles and the supernatural influence of Dymphna. This changed when St. Dymphna Church was closed by French revolutionary armies in 1797. Although the church would reopen, there was a paradigm shift after the French Revolution, as mental illness became the “concern of doctors, and not of pastors,” according to Eugeen Roosens, author of Mental Patients in Town Life: Geel — Europe’s First Therapeutic Community.

Southern Baptist congregations are also losing members who are leaving the faith altogether. The losses here are worse than to evangelical churches. Sure, some people who grew up with no religion convert and join an SBC church. But for each convert, the SBC loses three of its youth who grow up to have no religious affiliation.

Not all who leave the SBC do so for other conservative or moderate churches. There is about three percent who join liberal Protestant churches. There is also a couple percent who join a non-Christian religion. Southern Baptists rarely bring in members from either group.

The only net-gain for the SBC are from Catholics. Very few who grew up in an SBC church convert to Catholicism. Southern Baptists are able to bring in about two Catholics for every one they lose to the Catholic Church.

And again – shockingly for midday in the beginning of July – it was super hot and the animals responded in kind. But – we didn’t pay any admission because of our zoo membership here, and I wouldn’t have stopped if we had to pay, anyway.

So it was worth a 30-minute stop that wasn’t out of the way on the journey somewhere else to see a bunch of gators, some chameleons, two beaded lizards, a few other interesting reptiles, some meerkats and a rhino. But not worth a separate trip, for sure. Especially if you ever, you know, visited a zoo before.

If you are traveling from Birmingham to the not-panhandle of Florida, there are three ways you can go.

First, you can head down 65 to Montgomery, then take a state highway to Troy, then Dothan, then cross over to Florida, catch I-10 and drive east. I did that once and swore never again. Horrible. The road between Montgomery and Dothan is slow and going around Dothan is hellish. I’m convinced the Dothan city fathers and mothers keep it that way to encourage you to just give up on driving, stay a while and spend some money.

Secondly, there is a more diagonal path out of Birmingham on a highway 280 that takes you down towards Auburn, then across the border to Columbus, by Albany and then catching I-75 somewhere, perhaps Tifton. I had never taken this way because I didn’t know how fast the state roads were. I had visions of stopping at stoplights in small towns every five miles.

Last, there is straight interstate. This is the longest, mile-wise, and Google Maps hardly ever recommends it, but it’s also usually the fastest. I-20 across to Atlanta, the 75 down to Florida. Because you can go, er, 70 mph, it’s quicker than any of the others if there are no traffic issues. Recently, though, they have been doing construction south of Atlanta, and that Google Maps shows lots and lots of red in that area, which I experienced when I took them down last week, so when I returned with them, I thought we’d go the Columbus way, not only because I thought it was time to give it a chance, but also because I wanted to see Columbus.

(I had thought about doing Andersonville this trip – but ultimately decided it needed more context and time to process the awfulness, and this wasn’t the moment for that.)

As it turns out, you can go pretty fast on much of the route -the speed limit is 65 for big stretches of it. The only aggravating part of it to me was between Albany and 75, which seemed interminable on the way down, but that might be because it was dark and I was ready to stop.

Columbus is on the Chatahoochee River, which also flows up around Atlanta…a big river. It’s also the home of the huge Fort Benning, so there’s a substantial military presence and identity in the town. Our primary destinations were two this time: the National Infantry Museum and the riverfront.

The first is large and designed to impress. The exhibits are very well done, absorbing and not jingoistic at all. We didn’t see all of it because we didn’t arrive until 3:45 and they close at 5, but we did get a good look at their most well-known exhibit “The Last 100 Yards” and exhibit halls that traced the history of the infantry. I learned a few things – like in the days of the calvary, horses were sorted by color for different units to better identify them.

Then it was down to the Riverfront, and we saw once again how the presence of water really helps a downtown – something we don’t have here in land-locked Birmingham. It’s not as park-like as the Greeneville, South Caroline riverfront and not as busy and commercially vibrant as Chattanooga, but it’s not dead either, by any means. There’s a whitewater rafting service that runs the rapids – but it didn’t seem like a very long course, unless I wasn’t understanding the set-up. The same service runs a zipline across the river, so you can zip from Georgia to Alabama, if you like.

Riverfront, white water course..on right, turbines and in background one of the many former cotton warehouses and mills that lined the river.

It was nice – we might return – it’s only 2.5 miles from Birmingham, and there’s a state park nearby: Providence Canyon, which is apparently impressive, but also educational since it’s not the result of millenia of natural erosion, but of poor 19th and early 20th century farming practices. It’s also (they say) best to see it when the leaves are off the trees. And probably not so damn hot. So we’ll wait for late fall/winter for that…

The beginnings of these trips are always so odd – you lose a day of your life, in this case, Sunday.

We flew out of Atlanta. Yes, Birmingham has an airport, but for international flights, you are probably going to get a better deal out of Atlanta (although Atlanta international fare “deals” are not much to shout about. I did well on this fare, though.) ..and the last time we flew internationally to and from Birmingham, we almost missed the connecting flight back to Birmingham from Atlanta because of customs, so I swore we would never do that again.

On the way, we caught the Vigil Mass at this sweet little church in Carrollton, Georgia.

It’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and I really like the design of this metal ornamentation on the exterior.

Parked offsite at the airport, where it’s cheaper, and got on a plane to London, waited a couple of hours, and then flew to Bologna. The flights were fine. They had never flow British Airways before and were blown away by the difference in service between that and American airlines. Some sleeping occurred on the way over the Atlantic, and more between London and Bologna. Even I slept a bit, which I usually don’t do.

We were too tired to explore Heathrow much, although I did peak in the multi-faith prayer room, where a few Muslim men were saying their prayers.

We are in an apartment in Bologna. We didn’t get here until after 6. Met by the owner, we were oriented, and then walked a bit. Got pizza, checked out the grocery store, found Kinder Eggs, then came back. Asleep by 9, I woke up by 7 AM and set out to explore a bit and get my bearings. I happened upon the Cathedral, where Mass was happening, and saw this marvelous terracotta figure grouping. Compianto su Cristo morto.

There is another, more famous terracotta group elsewhere in the city. We’ll find it.

Random shots. Find me on Snapchat (amywelborn2) and Instagram (amy_welborn) for more frequent updates and even some expertly-shot video.

We’ll try to check some of this out.

Unfortunately, we will have to miss St. Philip Neri being honored by Italians singing American Gospel music.

The second floor of the grocery store has a pharmacy/health goods, plus this area growing herbs that you can pack up and purchase.

View from the apartment. I don’t mind. I’ts quiet. City apartments with a street view tend to be…loud, as we learned in Madrid, painfully.

Yesterday, the 11-year old and I made the overdue trip over to Atlanta.

(A bit over 2 hours from Birmingham, straight I-20 all the way)

The purpose: to trade with my oldest son. I had something of his that he had included in a gift shipped here to save postage, and he had all my Rome guidebooks.

So after I dropped the high schooler off, we headed over.

We met, did the exchange, spent some time talking, and then…what?

We had a couple of hours. We’re done with the Aquarium – we’ve been several times, it’s expensive and seems to shrink every time we go. We’ve visited the Zoo fairly recently. Fernbank is in the wrong direction and there’s not a lot to it. The temporary exhibits currently at the High Museum of Art don’t interest us. I’d like to go to the Atlanta History Center at some point, but not without the high schooler.

So…how about the Botanical Gardens?

We’d never been, mostly because admission is charged, and we are spoiled by our lovely, no-admission Birmingham Botanical Gardens (and our sweet no-admission Birmingham Museum of Art). But they tempted me with a special exhibit of Dale Chihuly glass sculptures – it seemed like a decent way to spend a couple of hours, so why not?

The sculptures are fine, although really not that intriguing, except from the “how did they pack them up and get them here without breaking everything” perspective.

No, what struck me on this visit was this:

These glass tubes, no matter how delicate and ingeniously wrought, were amateur hour when compared to this:

The leaves of these plants in the conservatory looked as if they had been painted by hand.

The juxtaposition of tiny round succulunt leaves with their protective spikes was arresting.

Masterpiece after masterpiece.

Over and over, beauty, down to the levels we cannot see, to the levels that sustain us every day, the stuff of ourselves that we cannot see and can never make with our own limited minds and clumsy hands.